I've been hearing that since 1995, and it wasn't true then and it isn't true now. Kind of like a 1965 Popular Mechanics magazine proclaiming that hovercars and jetpacks are the future of personal travel.
A site like yelp, which might feel local if you only look up places in your city, would fail if it limited itself to one city. If craigslist hadn't expanded beyond San Francisco, you would have never heard of it. It would still be Craig's hobby site, full of listings on where to get the best wheat grass on Geary Street. If Facebook had remained Harvard-only, you wouldn't even know it existed.
We use non-local sites to do and find local things. But to survive, those sites generally need to service an entire country or countries or worlds.
Besides, everyone knows the future of everything is China. Get with it.
Those soundbite people are not forum people. Apples and oranges.
If your forum can't "promote any sort of meaningful discussion," the problem is your forum, not the entire population of the world.
Ask Google with the acquisition of Zagat, and AOL with Patch if the future isn't local.
But I don't really care what corporations have to do to survive, or what their marketing department thinks they have to do to game the system.. My focus is on how people can harness the technology to get ahead of the marketers to empower themselves and enhance their lives, their communities, not on how they shop.
No doubt local is a tough nut to crack. It has been. But things have changed since 1995, the Internet has evolved. Did it ever occur to you that local communities can become networked? Craigslist happens to be a good example. I think their success can be attributed to the fact that they started with a good model.
And again, I'll refer you to
URBAN75, a local based forum in London with over 40,000 members. They're surviving just fine. No ads, no SEO, no jumping through hoops to get Pageranking, just member donations. After a decade they've expanded to other cities, but that isn't the reason for their success. They expanded
because they're successful. Same with Craigslist. It was successful
before it expanded. They wisely used the bottom-up approach. This is where local communities actually have an advantage over the "big players" who are too invested in top-down.
Over the years people are finding that spending a lot of time online with people across distances (whom they might never meet and share real life experiences with) is not as satisfying as connecting locally (this may be the reason why niche forums lost their edge). It only makes sense. We all live somewhere, we are rooted in our own reality. Virtual reality is a passtime, it's an abstraction, whereas life is lived in a place. Online we talk, in real life we act. Ultimately, words only have power if they lead to action.
It seems to me inevitable that Internet tools will be used to help people step away from the computer, not get stuck behind the keyboard ignoring life around them. Think of the Eyptians using facebook to connect locally and meet up in a city square. Look what they accomplished. Pretty powerful stuff, no? It wouldn't have made a difference if it was facebook, twitter, or xenforo. They could have used any one of them. It was that they used the tools to act locally (actually, now that they've toppled the dictator, a xenforo-stye forum might be the better tool to deliberate on how to forge a new democracy).
When people start to "get it" that local is the future you're going to see changes people never dreamed the Internet could help bring about.
Welcome to the 21st century.
